Henrietta Lacks was a poor tobacco farmer from Virginia who died from aggressive cervical cancer in 1951.
After her death, doctors harvested her cells at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital without her consent or her family’s knowledge.
Her cells, nicknamed “HeLa,” were special, and used to develop the AIDS cocktail, the polio vaccine, treatments for hemophilia, herpes, influenza and leukemia, and in-vitro fertilization.
Henrietta and her family never benefited from the thousands of patents and BILLIONS of dollars her cells helped generate.
Her story become known in 2010 and serves as a reminder that we must continue to demand respect from the medical and scientific community.
